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James F. Tent, The United States and the European Right, 1945–1955, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Page 582, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486349
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Deborah Kisatsky's examination of U.S. policy in Western Europe following World War II fairly represents recent international histories that examine American goals during the first decade following World War II. Her conclusions are unambiguous: “Americans,” she writes, “contained, co-opted or cooperated with conservative and reactionary elements according to whether such groups hindered or advanced U.S. objectives in Europe” (p. 110). In short, realpolitik dominated American actions, not lofty moral schemes such as the oftstated ideal of strengthening democracy.
Kisatsky has marshaled considerable material to buttress her conclusions, and the examples she chose are convincing. Her study shows anew that influential U.S. leaders favored conservative, capitalist Konrad Adenauer over socialist, independent Kurt Schumacher because the former was cooperative and the latter was too independent. However, the chapter on the unseemly bdj affair of 1951–1952 is more instructive. The bdj (Bund Deutscher Jugend or “League of German Youth”), connected to Adenauer's Christian Democratic party (cdu), contained a small Technischer Dienst (Technical Service) that was, in reality, a covert program set up by the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (cic)—with Central Intelligence Agency (cia) oversight—to co-opt marginal German right-wing nationalists into a network of “stay-behind” agents, should the Soviet Union occupy all of Germany. More sinister were the lists of German Social Democratic party (spd) and Communist party members targeted for “liquidation” by the Technical Service that surfaced, causing a fury within the Federal Republic's left-wing press. Outright evidence was spotty, however, and the affair bogged down in state and federal cdu-spd exchanges and was then submerged by a massive cdu election victory in 1953. Nevertheless, Germany's murky bdj Affair provides a glimpse into the opportunistic aspects of an American foreign policy that appeared willing to use right-wing nationalists in its anticommunist crusade only a few years after the defeat of National Socialism.
